Saturday, July 12, 2008

Researchers Find Submerged Lost World

For decades, archaeologists and scientists have believed a land bridge connected Britain with the rest of Europe, but now say a sizeable land mass joined the two until about 10,000 years ago.

For now, they’re calling the new land Doggerland, named after the Dogger Bank, a large sandbank in the North Sea. Indications are that Doggerland was an ideal environment for Mesolithic people, complete with fertile plains and majestic rivers. Rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age consumed Doggerland and turned Britain into an island. Scientists want to determine whether the land mass sank gradually - as has been presumed until recently - or if a sudden geological upheaval could have caused sea water to suddenly submerge the large area.

Archaeologists and other researchers were able to determine the likely size and shorelines of Doggerland through use of seismic information Petroleum Geo-Services, a Norwegian oil company, loaned to them, as well as with computer modeling based on geological information.

For over a century, fishing boats have been finding prehistoric artifacts in the North Sea. Much of the material – such as bones of wooly mammoths - date from the Palaeolithic age that ended 10,000 years ago. But other recovered artifacts are from the later Mesolithic period. “Now we’ll be able to position these archaeological finds within the landscape to understand their meaning,” says Hans Peeters of the National Service for Archaeology in the Netherlands.

2 comments:

Have a look at a project I'm working on to map Doggerland on to modern-day Europe. The idea is to mark Doggerland as any land that has been reclaimed from the North Sea over the centuries - this includes much of the Netherlands as well as Denmark, Belgium, the east of England and the German islands in the North Sea.

Tides represent the high and low, the ebb and flow. They're the rhythm spanning millennia and an apt image for this blog as it seeks to provide accounts linking today with ages long past. New archaeological finds and scholarly speculations help us better understand our ancestors and this small planet we've shared. And the better we understand our forebears and their environs, the better we know ourselves.

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